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> The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the author has good writing skills is another academic. You lack an understanding of the purpose

> The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the author has good writing skills is another academic. You lack an understanding of the purpose and target audience of journal papers. Papers are written by experts, for experts, to be the most concise presentation of new, field-advancing facts as possible. Prior knowledge of basic, and even intermediate-level knowledge has to be assumed, otherwise it places too much burden on the authors. You sound like a grad student who's sick of reading papers. I'm sorry, that part sucks. But eventually you don't have to anymore, and then you'll understand.

BeetleB 9y ago
>Papers are written by experts, for experts I understand that fully. You are merely restating the original complaint, which was "gatekeeping higher education" Essentially, it's: "We write only for insiders". And it's not for any expert, but an expert in a subfield of a subfield. Someone who is merely an expert in the field will understand it broadly, but often not well enough to reproduce, and often not well enough to even gauge the legitimacy of the techniques. This becomes quite clear when you see some of the inane stuff reviewers write, which often indicates they did not understand your paper - yet they were picked as experts who were asked to review. >otherwise it places too much burden on the authors. There are multiple reasons I do not believe this is the reason: I can understand a lot of researchers not wanting to bother, but the reality goes deeper than that. They actively do not want others to put in more explanations. If an author wants to put in the time, why are they getting in the way? It's not unusual for a reviewer to ask to excise material that is explanatory. And frankly, in many research teams in universities, we have grad students who are just starting out and are not to the point of being productive yet. It is very beneficial to have them write the more intermediate stuff. It's not at all time wasted for them. I'm not saying we need to include standard text book material in all papers. Often an additional 1-5 pages (depends on the scope of the work) will suffice. Any researcher who complains about writing an extra page or two for some project that they worked months on cannot say they care about propagating knowledge with a straight face. The additional time it will take you to write those few pages is vastly offset by the savings everyone (including experts) who reads the paper. That equation that took me days to derive will likely take most experts days as well. Whereas a few pages of derivation would save them all the effort (and would help a reviewer find errors). I've heard mathematicians be proud if they've read N pages a day (where N is in {1,2,3}) of a typical paper in their field. Yet when I've asked, they've all admitted that had the author put in more effort, that N would be much larger. They're written for experts, as you say, but even experts have trouble reading them. However, since they mostly only deal with experts, their baseline is very low compared to what the rest of the world would consider "readable". If I wrote a report in my industry that would take some expert a day to read and understand 6 pages, I would be in trouble. Again, this may vary from discipline to discipline. I definitely have read papers that don't suffer from the above. Ultimately it's a cultural issue. Some are more welcoming of it, others are not.

BeetleB 9y ago

>Papers are written by experts, for experts I understand that fully. You are merely restating the original complaint, which was "gatekeeping higher education" Essentially, it's: "We write only for insiders". And it's not for any expert, but an expert in a subfield of a subfield. Someone who is merely an expert in the field will understand it broadly, but often not well enough to reproduce, and often not well enough to even gauge the legitimacy of the techniques. This becomes quite clear when you see some of the inane stuff reviewers write, which often indicates they did not understand your paper - yet they were picked as experts who were asked to review. >otherwise it places too much burden on the authors. There are multiple reasons I do not believe this is the reason: I can understand a lot of researchers not wanting to bother, but the reality goes deeper than that. They actively do not want others to put in more explanations. If an author wants to put in the time, why are they getting in the way? It's not unusual for a reviewer to ask to excise material that is explanatory. And frankly, in many research teams in universities, we have grad students who are just starting out and are not to the point of being productive yet. It is very beneficial to have them write the more intermediate stuff. It's not at all time wasted for them. I'm not saying we need to include standard text book material in all papers. Often an additional 1-5 pages (depends on the scope of the work) will suffice. Any researcher who complains about writing an extra page or two for some project that they worked months on cannot say they care about propagating knowledge with a straight face. The additional time it will take you to write those few pages is vastly offset by the savings everyone (including experts) who reads the paper. That equation that took me days to derive will likely take most experts days as well. Whereas a few pages of derivation would save them all the effort (and would help a reviewer find errors). I've heard mathematicians be proud if they've read N pages a day (where N is in {1,2,3}) of a typical paper in their field. Yet when I've asked, they've all admitted that had the author put in more effort, that N would be much larger. They're written for experts, as you say, but even experts have trouble reading them. However, since they mostly only deal with experts, their baseline is very low compared to what the rest of the world would consider "readable". If I wrote a report in my industry that would take some expert a day to read and understand 6 pages, I would be in trouble. Again, this may vary from discipline to discipline. I definitely have read papers that don't suffer from the above. Ultimately it's a cultural issue. Some are more welcoming of it, others are not.